Review: THE FIX, David Baldacci

• this edition published by Hachette Book Group 2017
• ISBN 978-1-4879-4546-8
• 417 pages
• #3 in the Amos Decker series
• source: my local library

Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

Amos Decker witnesses a murder just outside FBI headquarters. A man shoots a woman execution-style on a crowded sidewalk, then turns the gun on himself.

Even with Decker's extraordinary powers of observation and deduction, the killing is baffling. Decker and his team can find absolutely no connection between the shooter--a family man with a successful consulting business--and his victim, a schoolteacher. Nor is there a hint of any possible motive for the attack.

Enter Harper Brown. An agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency, she orders Decker to back off the case. The murder is part of an open DIA investigation, one so classified that Decker and his team aren't cleared for it.

But they learn that the DIA believes solving the murder is now a matter of urgent national security. Critical information may have been leaked to a hostile government--or worse, an international terrorist group--and an attack may be imminent.

Decker's never been one to follow the rules, especially with the stakes so high. Forced into an uneasy alliance with Agent Brown, Decker remains laser focused on only one goal: solving the case before it's too late.

My Take:

Amos Decker is "the memory man" - the man who has a photographic memory, the man who can never forget. He also appears to others to be a little tunnel-visioned, perhaps a touch autistic. He hasn't always been that way. His special powers are the result of severe concussion which has put his brain onto a permanent state of video record.

The murder takes place right in front of Decker, in front of the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. And nothing about it seems to make sense.The shooter is a respectable business man on his way to a meeting at headquarters and he doesn't appear to know the victim at all. The FBI investigation gets a set back when a DIA tells them that they must surrender the investigation to them.

The case turns out to be one of "homeland security", that state of awareness that the USA has been in since 9/11. But the issues that result in the shooting go back decades.

My Rating: 4.4

I've also read THE WHOLE TRUTH